A corporation may protect its network in a number of different ways. For example, a corporate security infrastructure may include firewalls, intrusion detection, Uniform Resource Locator (URL) filtering, content inspection, etc. Further, corporations may enforce certain procedures that must be followed by employees who wish to use processing devices to access the corporate network from within the office.
Telecommuters, mobile employees, remote business partners, etc. may desire remote access to a corporate network. At least some of these users may wish to access the corporate network over the Internet or via another network or group of networks. However, because these users do not access the corporate network via the corporate security infrastructure, the users' processing devices may be compromised. For example, a user's processing device may have been infected with a virus while surfing the Internet for personal or business use. Further, the user's processing device may be executing malevolent software, such as, for example, a key-logging process, which may capture log-in identifiers (IDs), such as User IDs, and passwords entered by the user for access to the corporate network, as well as other networks, and may send the captured IDs and passwords to a hacker.
Viruses, other malevolent software, or hackers with stolen passwords may cause a corporate network to be compromised. For example, hackers may gain access to confidential corporate information stored on network devices or viruses may cause the loss of use of corporate information technology (IT) assets for some period of time, thereby having a negative effect on productivity. Further, the loss of confidential information may lead to lost profits and/or loss of reputation in the marketplace. Therefore, to better protect corporate network resources, corporations may attempt to either block remote access to corporate IT assets or check the security of processing devices used for remote access before permitting remote users to continue to access sensitive IT assets.